Tag: navel gazing

I recently (and by recently I mean this morning! Ha!) started listening to 5 Minutes in Church History, a podcast hosted by Dr. Stephen Nichols. It is perfect because my commute to work is roughly seven minutes. The only time it is longer is if I am delayed by a huge tractor taking up half the road (at least a few times a week – I kid you not) or by several deer crossing the road right in front of me such as occurred this morning.

I started the podcast on the very first episode which was made available for listening almost five years ago. After all, the beginning is a very good place to start, right? It is titled, “Confessions Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow: Augustine’s Big Word.” Yeah, not that exciting of a title but the way stick with me. This morning I read these words from Galatians 1:10 in my Bible study, “For now am I seeking the approval of man, or of God? Or am I trying to please man? If I were still trying to please man, I would not be a servant of Christ.” We are not to be man-pleasers but God-pleasers. We are to seek to please God in all that we say, do and think. However, as this podcast reminds us, we live in a belly-button generation. We are consumed with ourselves and being accepted by others: “This sociologist was saying we’re like infants when they first discover their own belly button. They’re utterly fascinated by it. Okay, when you’re an infant. But, as we grow up if we fail to see there’s a world around us, we are living pretty shallow lives. If we’re still fascinated by our belly buttons, something is wrong.”

What we need is a big view of God, a God who is great and vast. A few minutes later in my morning Bible study I read these words in Isaiah 45, “I am the LORD, and there is no other, besides me there is no God…I form light and create darkness, I make well-being and create calamity, I am the LORD, who does all these things” (Isaiah 45:5-7). There is a God who is far greater than us and worthy of all our love and thought and emotion and energy and whatever else you can think of. Stop staring at your navel! You and I are not the main characters. That role belongs to God and God alone! So let us look up and see ourselves as the dot that we are and God who is Magnus – vast, great – and what matters most!